Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/103

 even the plebeian dogs are now in the habit of saying to their valets de chiens. But there were three things which Von Auf hammer never recalled,—his error, his anger, and his word. The provokee, therefore, determined that the plebeian provoker and honor-stealer should never more speak to him, or—get a doit from him.

I return. After dinner he gazed out of the little window into the garden, and saw his path of life dividing into four branches, leading towards just as many skyward Ascensions; towards the Ascension into the Parsonage, and that into the Castle to Thiennette, for this day; and towards the third into Schadeck for the morrow; and lastly, into every house in Hukelum as the fourth. And now, when the mother had long enough kept cheerfully gliding about on tiptoe, "not to disturb him in studying his Latin Bible" (the Vulgata), that is, in reading the Litteraturzeitung, he at last rose to his own feet; and the humble joy of the mother ran long after the courageous son, who dared to go forth and speak to a Senior, quite unappalled. Yet it was not without reverence that he entered the dwelling of his old, rather gray than bald-headed, teacher, who was not only Virtue itself, but also Hunger, eating frequently, and with the appetite of Pharaoh's lean kine. A school-man that expects to become a professor will scarcely deign to cast an eye on a pastor; but one who is himself looking up to a parsonage as to his working-house and breeding-house, knows how to value such a character. The new parsonage—as if it had, like a Casa Santa, come flying out of Erlang, or the Berlin Friedrichs-strasse, and alighted in Hukelum—was for the Quintus a Temple of the Sun, and the Senior a Priest of the Sun. To be Parson there himself was a thought overlaid with virgin honey; such a thought as occurs but one other time in